Every virtual machine has its own hardware profile based on the resources required for the operating system and the applications that you plan to run within the virtual machine. Having said that, you may need to identify the best hardware options to improve performance, reliability, high availability, and other resources available for every scenario that may arise. Normally, the principal hardware components are the disks and network resources being used on these virtual machines.

In some examples, you may need more disk performance to support a specific database requirement, maybe you might need to allow a virtual machine to connect directly to an existing storage array via Fibre Channel or you might need to optimize network throughput and take advantage of Single Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV). You also may require protection against hardware failure or need to add advanced security protection to your virtual machine network. That's why we created a whole section in this book...